Is the mining of any Cryptocoin worth it?

Lately, more and more people have decided to deal with the mining of the latest cryptocoin, such as zcash and ethereum. Is it worth investing in mining?

The first few months of bitcoin mining were something similar to the “Gold Rush” fever. The new currency of Satoshi Nakomoto has opened up new horizons to the creation and acquisition of -easy- money. This was the beginning of the occupation of many with the mining, thus the construction and sell of special equipment-miners, which undertook the “mining” of these coins.

But is mining profitable? It depends.

Coin mining started with the enthusiasm of the first “miner” in a business worth millions. The first people started with mining (bitcoin), saw their efforts to succeed. However, as the time passed and with the involvement of more and more people, and even the large mining farms, where they had much more power to work with, the extraction of coins reached at very difficult levels, resulting in only “stones” rather than “gold”, at least to those who wanted easy coins.

Beyond the bitcoin, other coins were created, such as litecoin, zcash and ethereum. Of these, lately, zcash and ethereum have gained more people, mainly because they require the use of GPUs for their extraction, making mining like a game now, since most PC users have powerful PCs and can start mining with a few clicks.

Many users saw the whole thing positively and decided to invest in hardware, especially in expensive GPUs, to start the “sport”. So from the Rx series graphics cards, they got to the GTX1060 to have more power in their system and hence better performance. The sweetness of easy money, however, did not let them see things clearly.

Let’s look at, for example, to advertisements of used parts. One seller I found, gives 6 GPUs (3x Asus Rx570 + 3 x Asus Rx580) at a price of €3500 in a ready-to-use mining system.

According to him, who says he gives it because he wants to get a better system (although I think he gives it because he saw no profit), the system yields at dual mining ethereum at 165MH/s, with a consumption of around 700 -800W.

If we say that the price of a kilowatt per hour is around €0.204 (in Europe), at a yield of 165 MH/s we have a profit of about 0.04070 eth a day, that is $6.86 (with $6.72 the cost of electricity) or $205.90 a month ($2,505 per year).

In order one to get back the cost of buying the parts, he should have the system for one and a half years and from then on it will start to make a profit and only if the extraction difficulty will not be increased and the profit will not be reduced even more.

If someone now decides to buy an expensive card for ether mining, such as the Gigabyte GeForce GTX1060 6GB, priced at around €350, which gives around 25 Mh/s (overclocked), he only can have profit if he has his system connected to a solar power supply since the profit is about $0.82 per day (or $25 a month), meaning the system will have to work for over a year to get the cost of the graphics card only so after that he can make a profit.

In a nutshell, mining is not worth it if you do not decide to invest a lot of money and build a system for mining only, that will be powered by a solar system rather than from electricity. And that will give you profits in the long run, if in the meantime the difficulty of the currency you have chosen does not grow.